Movie: Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991)
When it comes to 1991 romances about interracial highly charismatic couples negotiating their passionate love for each other with the prejudices of their friends and family and the contradictions of American society (despite its inherently discriminatory nature it still offers minority groups many opportunities for personal enrichment, self-expression and happiness), Mississippi Masala is no Jungle Fever. It is still a really good film where even the smallest roles get wonderful character beats, and everyone gets overshadowed by Denzel Washington at his best. He plays Demetrius, a carpet cleaner who has his own business and falls in love with Indian immigrant Mina (Sarita Choudhoury). Her family owns some motels and storefronts, but it's not much compared to their old life in Uganda. They used to live in a colonial house on a large plantation until Idi Amin expelled all Indians from his country. Mina's father Jay (Roshan Seth) has been born in Uganda, has never set foot in India, and spends most of his time in Mississippi writing letters to Uganda's post-Amin regime trying to get his confiscated property back.
The brief flashbacks to life in Uganda present Jay as a well-connected, well-respected man in high society. He is quite obviously aware that his life is the result of the British colonialism, and is intelligent enough to sound vaguely progressive without ever implicating himself or his fellow Asians. When Amin orders his expulsion, his best friend, a black Ugandan he spent his entire childhood with, rationalises the decision: "Africa belongs to black Africans." Nair is not interested in clean racial hierarchies and presents everyone in the film at some point as both a victim and perpetrator of racism, entirely dependent on their position in life. Racist ideology is both invisible and all-encompassing - everyone needs to carve out a life for themselves within the social structures they are faced with, and as a result all racist or anti-racist decisions are mostly motivated by convenience rather than morality. That's even partially true for the film's romantic ending.
It makes sense that most American films about race and blackness mostly focus on their own communities, but sometimes you'd wish they'd add a little more of the international/geopolitical perspective of Mississippi Masala. Jungle Fever lacks that too, but Spike Lee does have a much defter filmmaking touch allowing him to shift tones and styles much more naturally, and express the different moods and states of mind of his characters without ever losing the forest for the trees. Denzel Washington makes a case for the most charismatic man of 1991 here, and it's not unreasonable to occasionally stop the film dead in its tracks to give him a reaction shot that anticipates audience applause. However some of the comedy and exposition in the film is directed in the same way, with especially Mina's extended Indian family depicted as if it comes straight from a mediocre American sitcom. Everyone has highly exaggerated accents and mannerism and ends up in situations of manufactured awkwardness that are completely disconnected from the main narrative and aren't developed enough to work as funny standalone set pieces. It's notable that Nair only abandons her "we have a lot to do and very little time to do it in" approach during the romantic scenes between Mina and Demetrius. The film slows down during their scenes together lingering on every gentle touch and gesture, and the pleasure they get out of it.
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